Life is sweet –even when I’m tired and work is… work and it’s too hot and/or too cold (jon stewart’s line: hits by grandma, featuring “Its suffocatingly hot” and the B side, “now I’m too cold”) and the grass isn’t mowed and we have to do laundry and grocery shop and the car has a rumble… there’s a peace and a beauty I’ve not felt in so long… maybe ever.

It’s making you a sandwich though you say you’re fine, because I know it’s what you need; it’s you telling me “I got it” and that I know you do. It’s watching you write out cards and scroll through books and spreadsheets and maps, for us; and merging those cards with my own. It’s yard-saling, the perfect rhythm of my energy for selling and yours for packing and clearing. It’s walking with weights and strolling with woofs, our steps and words echoing as we move.

It’s holding my niece, crayons in one fist, new shirt I bought her dragged along in the other, playing in the grass and breezes, hearing her hearty laugh.

It’s friends, who sail in and out, but are there, always.

It’s working out physically in the gym and emotionally at meditation and feeling change if not seeing it quite yet.

So there’s still the orange line, the pointy bags, the close talkers. And there’s still work and trying to prove myself and help others thrive and learn. And there’s undone blogs, and “nights” I fall asleep at 4 p.m., and the missed opportunity of a deal unsnagged, but still…
there is still and peace and calm and… love.

So I’m a week late, but here I am, apolitical Washwords, blogging, as promised, about cupcakes.

(See, I can be sweet!)

I have a regularly scheduled appointment every Wednesday (it lasts 50 minutes) at a place near the fabbbulous newly opened Hello Cupcake. They sell… you guessed it: cupcakes! Yes, they’re pricey; yes, they are the kind of thing I might blog about as being the worst kind of emperor’s-new-clothes pretentious (ohh I HAVE to have that $3.00 cupcake! in the brown box tied up with string!)

But

I DO have to have it. Hello Cupcake’s cakes are pretty. They have pretty names (Peanut Butter Blossom, Peppermint Penny, De Lime and De Coconut); they have pretty colors (Easter egg pinks and greens and buttercreamy white and tan); and yes, they come in pretty brown boxes with pink stickers.

And

they’re delicious.

So… I’ve started a new tradition. Every Wednesday when I go to my Regularly Scheduled Appointment, I bring back cupcakes (sometimes 4, sometimes 6) to deserving fellow workerbee pals. Because let’s face it, someone could ALWAYS use a cupcake.

Response has been amazing. In the last few weeks I’ve given cupcakes to:

Please don’t tell me if Street Sense, the Washington D.C. based paper for and by the city’s homeless, has a downside, a seedy uncurrent, a mismanaged office. I don’t want to know. Because I love it.

I love the home-grown nature of it, the pull-yourself up by your bootstraps nature of it, and, frankly, the fine writing! Check out this April’s fools’ day post, slamming on -gasp – our nation’s finest baseball team, management, and sense of “giving back.” :

Opening Day has taken on new meaning in the nation’s capital this year as the Washington Nationals are opening the doors of
their new southeast D.C. stadium to the
city’s homeless population for overnight
stays throughout the season.
Under the “Open Door Policy” unveiled
on April Fool’s Day by Team President Stan
Kasten, the homeless are invited to sleep in
stadium seats or on the concourse at Nationals
Park but must stay off of the field,
a compromise brokered by Head Groundskeeper
Doug Lopas, who stressed the need
to protect the stadium’s new turf.
“This generous plan will keep displaced
residents from having to leave the city in
a futile search for low-income housing options,”
said Barbara Silva, the Nationals director of community relations. “the impression that economic progress depressed regions has a detrimental effect on
the poor.”

Wow. The article goes on to quote fans, players, and other afficiniados of the new “sleepover day.”